The Institute of Making

image: Institute of Making: silica aerogel, a glass foam whose nano-structure contains up to 99.8% air :  the world's lightest solid

The Institute of Making is a multidisciplinary research club for those interested in the made world: from makers of molecules to makers of buildings, synthetic skin to spacecraft, soup to diamonds, socks to cities. 

They run  programme of symposia, masterclasses and public events to explore the links between academic research and hands-on experience, and to celebrate the sheer joy of stuff.

Its mission is to provide all makers with a creative home in which to innovate, contemplate and understand all aspects of materials and an inspiring place to explore their relationship to making.

At the heart of the Institute of Making is the Materials Library – a growing repository of some of the most extraordinary materials on earth, gathered together for their ability to fire the imagination and advance conceptualisation. A place in which makers from all disciplines can see, touch, research and discuss, so that they can apply the knowledge and experience gained to their own practice.

Alongside the collection is the MakeSpace – a workshop where members and guests can make, break, design and combine both advanced and traditional tools, techniques and materials.

taken from their website

thank you Ingrid for the introduction!

Product Designs: It's Nice That

BSG's WOOD.b bike

I was looking for a good selection of Product design images and came across It's Nice That.

"Founded in 2007, It’s Nice That is a publishing platform that encompasses several different online, print and events offerings as part of its mission of championing creativity across the art and design world".

The website, updated daily with at least nine new articles has an international readership of around 350,000 unique users a month. They publish a quarterly magazine Printed Pages and The Annual which rounds up some 150 of the most interesting projects to feature on the site in a single year. Their events programme includes annual creative symposium Here and monthly Nicer Tuesdays talks.

First Broadcast is their audio visual site for hosting original content, Company of Parrots a shop for specially-commissioned products and This At There is a dedicated arts and design exhibition listings guide to London. The Jobsboard connects employers and jobseekers in the creative industries.

enjoy great contemporary designs under the following categories

Advertising

Animation

Architecture

Art

Events

Exhibition

Fashion

Film

Furniture Design

Graphic Design

Illustration

Interactive

Miscellaneous

Music

Photography

Product Design

Publication

Sculpture

Set Design

Web

Decorating with Old Masters

Dutch art director Christian Borstlap created this film for the new Rijksmuseum project Rijksstudio. The film includes 211 artworks from the museum's online collection.

Video: Part of a Bigger Plan
Music: 'Dreaming' by Allo, Darlin

The Rijksmuseum uses Rijksstudio to make more than 125,000 objects from the collection digitally accessible, free of charge. You can zoom in, share them, and ‘like’ them. You can also create collections of your own, using your favourite images and details. Not only that, but the Rijksmuseum is also inviting you to use these images to create beautiful products. At this resolution, a single detail is still sharp enough to decorate a car.

 

This page shows some examples of other people’s creations and offers links to websites that supply various forms of printing on demand. Using them you could order wallpaper , decorate a scooter, have a vinyl foil for your phone, all of them featuring works of art from the Rijksmuseum

A Materials Library for the 21st Century

This video, by The Economist, features Andrew Dent, vice-president of Material ConneXion,sharing his thoughts on the evolution of material science.
Material ConneXion's online archive and material libraries, based in seven cities world-wide, feature over 6,500 of the world’s most cutting-edge materials all of them commercially available for use.
Andrew Dent believes Material ConneXion will help bridge the gap between science and design as we move from the “synthetic century” into a “biological century”, where intelligent, nature-inspired materials consume less resources and less energy.
 An international panel of experts review 50 to 60 new materials for the library every month, adding  only the best.
The archive is organized in eight categories (see below)  comprising the largest selection of sustainable materials and the only Cradle to Cradle materials library in the world:
the 8 categories: Polymers, Ceramics, Glass, Metals, Cement-based materials, Natural Materials, Carbon-based materials, Processes
An online Materials Database is available at a price to Universities (not available at Cardiff Met).

NewYork, Bangkok, Beijing, Cologne, Daegu, Istanbul, Milan, Seoul, Shanghai all have physical Material Connexions libraries

Feature articles from Matter magazine (published quarterly by Material Connexions) are available to read online . Each edition of the  journal  follows a specific  theme  like the special issues on  'Wellness' and 'Technology' and  all contain a wealth of information and images relating to innovative materials and their uses.

Thomas Heatherwick: the Cauldron and a Retrospective

The English designer takes Steve Rose through his retrospective show Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary, which runs at London's V&A until 30 September

Thomas Heatherwick is a designer architect from London and the man behind the Olympic Cauldron.

 The cauldron was lit on 27 July at the end of the end of the Olympics opening ceremony, which was directed by Danny Boyle.
The design of the cauldron had been one of the most closely-guarded secrets of the opening ceremony. When the competing delegations arrived in London, they each received a copper petal, inscribed with the name of their country and the words ‘XXX Olympiad London 2012’. They carried these petals into the stadium during the opening ceremony before laying them down on the cauldron. When all the petals had been laid down, the seven torchbearers each ignited a single tiny flame within one of the copper petals on the ground, triggering the ignition of all 204 petals. The Cauldron’s long, stainless-steel stems then rose towards each other and converged to form one single flame.
Lots more on Heatherwick here
The cauldron being lit here

Worth Global Style Network

Cardiff Met Library has a new and exciting electronic resource. It is called Worth Global Style Network, the resource that predicts and tracks new trends in fashion, textiles and related areas such as youth culture, marketing, branding and packaging. Rich in images both still and moving, you can view worldwide catwalk shows, see what’s in the high street shops right now or read what fabrics are likely to be appearing in two year’s time. Special features, news items and trend forecasting for colour, fashion and materials make this resource valuable for fashion, and textiles students but also definitely of potential interest for media studies students,  illustrators, graphic designers, product designers, interior designers and anyone interested in fashion and textiles and their world of image and fantasy, theatricality and display, invention and style. Available only to Cardiff Met staff and students it is part of the Electronic Library. Here is a link to it. Help and advice on this and all our other databases and resources available at Llandaff Library from Catherine Drake and at Howard Gardens Library from Jenny Godfrey.

Check out another fashion database we have for a month's trial until the end of May. It is called The Vogue Archive and comprises all the pages of all the American Vogue US edition from 1892-present as a  fully searchable database. Let Catherine or myself know what you think of it. Here is the link. Again this will only work for logged in staff and students of Cardiff Met.

Open Educational Resources at UAL and MIT

There are many free resources on the Internet, we know this;  the ones known as  Open  Educational Resources: (OER's) comprise educational material that can be freely used by anyone without any copyright restrictions. An OER can be anything from a streamed video like this one showing the sand casting process to this link to an entire course on Anthropology

The sandcasting video, is from Process Arts, managed by Chris Follows at University of the Arts London (UAL)  c.follows@arts.ac.uk

Process Arts  focuses on "making" in art and design . This  site shows  insights into the acts of making and encourages users to share knowledge and experience online. You can  go there to explore  traditional and contemporary creative technical processes , and see work and the processes involved in its making online through  video, text, image and sound .

sample stills sequence

here are the most viewed items from Process Arts. Look to the right of the page for a full list of Resources

Interesting courses including bibliographies, online texts and images etc  are available from the MIT site where the Anthropology course linked above was taken from. Courses include many other subject areas of interest such as media studies, history, literature, music and theatre arts, women's and gender studies. MIT is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose mission  is "to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century".

Materials are Poetic: Mtrl

holographic glass

In order to reach out to the design community, ASM, a US-based Materials Information Society, has set up /MTRL. Chris Lefteri Design was commissioned to provide a range of materials from the ASM collection, complete with extensive information and images, as a free on-line material database . So far, the database consists of 250 materials presented in a way that specifically targets designers and their needs.

I've seen many image databases in my time and  this one is a real find and especially useful as all our courses at Cardiff become  increasingly concerned with the physical  experiences of Materials and Making.

Mtrl is great fun and at the same time hugely informative. It is  crammed with well organised images and facts about materials and their properties. Here you can choose to search for images and information about materials by their 'form' (eg firm, powder, resin) 'personality' (eg dynamic , extreme, honest ), different types of ceramic, glass, plastic etc etc etc. It includes a section listing an unbelievable amount of 'additives and ingredients' (Floam anyone?).

Lightben transparent honeycomb core panel

It is  a lot more entrancing and unusual than you might expect of a materials database and is  at the same time of immense practical use. The database offers links from each type of material in the database to suppliers and also  gives  its eco standing (biodegradable/recyclable/renewable?)), its key features, all physical features,  its price range, major applications for use and  engineering properties. A veritable  alchemists shopping list..........

Steve Jobs- two different viewpoints

I am back after a  long absence but the blog will now be updated regularly as before-spread the word and keep reading!!

BBC 2 screened a documentary on 14th December entitled ' Steve Jobs: Million Dollar Hippy' "a long-haired college dropout with infinite ambition, and an inspirational perfectionist with a bully's temper. A man of contradictions, he fused a Californian counterculture attitude and a mastery of the art of hype with explosive advances in computer technology.
Insiders including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, the chairman who ousted Jobs from the company he founded, and Jobs' chief of software, tell extraordinary stories of the rise, fall and rise again of Apple with Steve Jobs at its helm.
With Stephen Fry, world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and branding guru Rita Clifton, Evan Davis decodes the formula that took Apple from suburban garage to global supremacy."

The arts desk an online arts reviews website has published a trenchant reaction to the programme by Jasper Rees in the wake of the BBC documentary.

Enjoy both and think about what Apple means to you (and the world).

Bright Ideas Lighting

Inhabitat (a weblog forum for emerging trends in architectural interior and product design), in partnership with Philips Lighting recently ran a competition called Bright Ideas Lighting. The idea of the competition was to showcase the potential of LED lighting. They were looking for examples of inspiring eco-friendly lamps that make smart use of materials, and are designed to work with low-energy LED replacement bulbs like Philips AmbientLED. (Since LED bulbs are low heat, this was an opportunity to get creative with other materials that might be off-limits with traditional incandescent bulbs). The panel of expert judges selected 20 finalists based upon aesthetics, creativity, sustainability, practicality, and commercial viability. Readers then voted for the winner.

The winner, designer Edward Chew,  cut box drink cartons into hundreds of strips and folded them into pieces to create his Tetra Pak lamp . Along with its retro looks and attractiveness it is also a creative example of upcycled design and craftsmanship – it was even assembled without the use of any adhesives!

Read about the competion and the other winners here

Festival of Britain 60 year anniversary

The National Archives Image Library has created a little image collection to celebrate the 60 year anniversary of The Festival of Britain . The Festival of Britain took place from May 3rd-September 30th 1951 to celebrate the British contribution to civilisation, past, present and future in the fields of art, technology and science and to encourage a looking forward after the horrors, privations and losses of the Second World War.
The National Archives Image Library contains other interesting image sets  including ones for Crime, Design, Mining and Maps.

Product information for architecture and construction

Just added to the Subject Guide for Architecture and Construction on the UWIC Learning portal (for staff  and students at UWIC only) are links to two websites offering free product information for architects and the construction industry.
These are the websites (everyone can view these)

• RIBA Product Selector offers a  database with information about building products , NBS specification information and RIBA CPD providers with free access to product catalogues, technical documents and contact information of 10261 UK manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, trade associations and construction service providers.
• Barbour Product Search  offers an extensive and up-to-date database of manufacturer and product profiles, with images, case studies, technical data and catalogues.

Ecobuild-the future of design,construction and the built environment

Ecobuild is the world’s largest event for sustainable design, construction and the built environment. Starting today and running until 3 March the conference features more than 600 speakers, 1300 exhibitors, 130 seminars and a packed programme of live demonstrations. If you can't make it to this free event (it's at the ExCeL exhibition and conference centre at the heart of the new Green Enterprise District in London’s Docklands) you can still explore the website and read the  Ecobuild blog on which  a panel of leading thinkers and doers, from around the industry share their views on the latest news and events every week.

Is the CD dying?

PITMAN, N.J

(Credit: Sony Corp.)

Pitman, which has 9,365 residents and is about 17 miles southeast of Philadelphia, is home to one of Sony's two remaining U.S.-based CD-manufacturing plants--until it closes on March 31. A longtime employee said  "The CD is dying." The first album released on CD and offered to the public was Billy Joel's "52nd Street" in October 1982.
The compact disc--the dominant music-distribution format for nearly three decades can compete no longer  with the portability of the ipod and similar devices that can store 2000 discs worth of  and after a decade of rampant illegal file sharing, , the plant closure is a also sign that the CD just couldn't compete with free music. (when)"they stopped putting CD players in cars I knew things were bad," the worker said. The CD was once a staple of a car's dashboard but the past several years, car manufacturers have searched for ways to tap into Web-distributed music.